Highlights:
• Evolutionary developmental (evo devo) biology is used as a model
for universal evolution and development.
• A developmental process is proposed that takes universal intelligence
to black hole efficiency and density.
• Unique properties of black holes as attractors for advanced intelligence
are reviewed.
• Testable implications of black hole transcension on exoplanet
search, METI and SETI are proposed.
• Information theoretic and evo devo arguments for transcension
as a solution to the Fermi paradox are proposed.

A low-mass
X-ray binary (LMXRB) star system. Strange as it seems, Earth's
postbiological future may look something like this, with us inside
a black hole of our own creation, on a highly accelerated path
to merging with other universal civilizations doing the same thing.
If true, our destiny is density!

Abstract:The
emerging science of evolutionary
developmental (“evo devo”) biology can aid us
in thinking about our universe as both an evolutionary system, where most
processes are unpredictable and creative, and a developmental system,
where a special few processes are predictable and constrained to produce
far-future-specific emergent order, just as we see in the common developmental
processes in two stars of an identical population type, or in two genetically
identical twins in biology. The transcension hypothesis proposes that
a universal process of evolutionary development guides all sufficiently
advanced civilizations into what may be called "inner space,"
a computationally optimal domain of increasingly dense, productive, miniaturized,
and efficient scales of space, time, energy, and matter, and eventually,
to a black-hole-like destination. Transcension as a developmental destiny
might also contribute to the solution to the Fermi
paradox, the question of why we have not seen evidence of
or received beacons from intelligent civilizations. A few potential evolutionary,
developmental, and information theoretic reasons, mechanisms, and models
for constrained transcension of advanced intelligence are briefly considered.
In particular, we introduce arguments that black holes may be a developmental
destiny and standard attractor for all higher intelligence, as they appear
to some to be ideal computing, learning, forward time travel, energy harvesting,
civilization merger, natural selection, and universe replication devices.
In the transcension hypothesis, simpler civilizations that succeed in
resisting transcension by staying in outer (normal) space would be developmental
failures, which are statistically very rare late in the life cycle of
any biological developing system. If transcension is a developmental process,
we may expect brief broadcasts or subtle forms of galactic engineering
to occur in small portions of a few galaxies, the handiwork of young and
immature civilizations, but constrained transcension should be by far
the norm for all mature civilizations.

The
transcension hypothesis has significant and testable implications for
our current and future METI and SETI agendas. If all universal intelligence
eventually transcends to black-hole-like environments, after which some
form of merger and selection occurs, and if two-way messaging (a send-receive
cycle) is severely limited by the great distances between neighboring
and rapidly transcending civilizations, then communication with feedback
may be very rare, an event restricted to nearest-neighbor stars for a
very brief period prior to transcension. The only kind of communication
that might be common enough to be easily detectable by us would be the
sending of one-way METI or probes throughout the galaxy. But simple one-way
messaging or probes may be not worth the cost to send, and advanced messaging
or probes may provably reduce the evolutionary diversity in all civilizations
receiving them, as they would condemn the receiver to transcending in
a manner similar to that of the sender. If each civilization in our universe
is quite limited in what they can learn given their finite computational
resources, and if many civilizations evolve in parallel and in isolation
in our universe for this reason, then a powerful ethical injunction against
one-way messaging or probes might emerge in the morality and sustainability
systems of all sufficiently advanced civilizations, an argument known
as the zoo
hypothesis in Fermi paradox literature. In any such environment,
the evolutionary value of sending any interstellar message or probe may
simply not be worth the cost, if transcension and post-transcension merger
are elements of an inevitable, accelerative, and testable developmental
process, one that eventually will be discovered and quantitatively described
by future physics.

Fortunately,
transcension processes may be measurable today even without good physical
theory, and radio and optical SETI may each provide empirical tests. If
transcension is a universal developmental constraint, then without exception
all early and low-power electromagnetic leakage signals (radar, radio,
television), and later, optical evidence of the exoplanets and their atmospheres
should reliably cease as each civilization enters its own technological
singularities (emergence of postbiological intelligence and life forms)
and recognizes they are on an optimal and accelerating path to a black-hole-like
environment. Furthermore, optical SETI may soon allow us to map an expanding
area of the galactic habitable zone we may call the galactic transcension
zone, an inner ring that contains older transcended civilizations, and
a missing planets problem as we discover that planets with life signatures
occur at a much lower frequencies in this inner ring than in the remainder
of the habitable zone.

The emerging science
of evolutionary developmental (“evo devo”) biology (Carroll 2005, Kirschner
and Gerhart 2005) can aid us in thinking about our universe as both an
evolutionary system, where most processes are unpredictable and creative,
and a developmental system, where a special few processes are predictable
and constrained to produce far-future-specific emergent order, as seen
in the developmental processes guiding the emergent similarities among
two genetically identical twins.

In discriminating between
evolution and development in living systems, one of the most important
insights is that the vast majority of biological change that we observe
in the emergence or control of complexity is evolutionary. By this we
mean it is unpredictable, stochastic, experimenting, creative, locally-driven,
a bottom-up, two-way (communication and feedback) process of complexity
creation and variation. Only a special subset of biological change, perhaps
something less than 5% at the genetic level, to a first approximation,
is what we call developmental. By this we mean it is predictable, cyclic,
randomness-reducing, convergent, conservative, globally-driven, a top-down,
one-way process of complexity conservation and constraint. The “developmental
genetic toolkit” is a set of special genes that have been highly conserved
in all higher life, from nematodes to humans. To a rough order it involves
2-5% of genes in complex organisms (e.g.,perhaps 2-3% of the
Dictyostelium genome of 13,000 genes, Iranfar et al., 2003). These genes constrain
and direct developmental change, and change very slowly over time. Evolutionary
processes range across the entire remainder (95-98%) of the genome, and
produce phenotypic variety. The genes involved in evolutionary processes
change much faster over time.

Gould (2002) has argued
that the only broadly predictable feature of evolutionary processes is
that their variety increases over time. Viewed over geologic time, the
“tree of life” gains ever more branches, species, and specializations
across all life-permitting environments.At
the same time, all biological systems engage in developmental processes,
which cause them to be born, grow, mature, replicate, grow old, and die.
Such perennial developmental life cycles are the conserved and constraining
framework upon which all evolutionary processes occur. If one has the
appropriate physical knowledge, such as the ability to computationally
model development, or if one has historical experience with prior cycles
of a developing system, developmental processes become predictable.

As Smart (2008, 2010),
Vidal (2008, 2010a,b), and others in the Evo
Devo Universe research community have proposed, evolution and development
may work the same way in the universe as a system. If our universe is
a system presently engaged in a life cycle (“Big Bang” birth, growth,
maturity, replication, senescence, and eventual thermodynamic or other
death), we may ask, which of its features are evolutionary, and which
are developmental, and which mechanisms it uses to pass on its evolutionary
intelligence in the next developmental life cycle. We can observe many
physical processes in our universe that seem perennially creative, exploratory,
and unpredictable (quantum mechanics, chaos, nonlinear dynamics, non-equilibrium
thermodynamics), and a special subset of processes that seem highly conservative,
constraining, and predictable (conservation laws, entropy, classical mechanics,
stellar lifecycles, spacetime acceleration). Both evolutionary and developmental
attractors, or systemic teleologies, appear to operate in this complex
system.

If universal change
is analogous to the evolutionary development of two genetically identical
twins, two parametrically identical universes (possessing identical fundamental
physical parameters at the Big Bang) would exhibit unpredictably separate
and unique internal evolutionary variation over their lifespan (unpredictable
differences in specific types of species, technologies, and knowledge
among civilizations), and at the same time, a broad set of predictable
and irreversible developmental milestones and shared structure and function
between them (broad and deep commonalities in the developmental processes,
body plans, and archetypes of life, culture and technology among all intelligent
civilizations). This question is thus relevant to astrophysics, astrobiology
and astrosociology. One potential developmental process that, if validated,
would have great impact on the future of civilizations will now be proposed.

The expansion hypothesis
(Kardashev 1964, and many others since) predicts that some fraction of
advanced civilizations in our galaxy and universe must become beacon builders
and spacefarers, spreading their knowledge and culture far and wide. Expansion
is the standard expectation of those engaged in SETI (search for extraterrestrial
intelligence) and METI (messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence) today.
Expansion scenarios typically assume ETI messaging to be bounded by the
speed of light, and space travel to occur at some significant fraction
of the speed of light.

By contrast, the transcension
hypothesis, also known as the developmental singularity hypothesis
(Smart 2000, 2008, 2010) proposes that a universal process of evolutionary
development guides all sufficiently advanced civilizations increasingly
into inner space, the domain of very small scales of space, time, energy
and matter (STEM), and eventually, to a black-hole-like destination, censored
from our observation. Vinge (1986), Banks (1988), Brin (1998a) and others
have explored variations of this idea in science fiction. If constrained
transcension operates on all advanced civilizations as they develop, and
if this process leads them, with rare exception, to enter inner space
or black-hole-like domains, this would explain Enrico Fermi's curious
paradox, the question of why we have not seen signs of intelligence in
our own galaxy, even though Earth has likely developed intelligent life
one to three billion years later than other Earth-like environments closer
to our galactic core (Lineweaver et. al. 2004). This impressively long
period of prior evolutionary development provides plenty of time for messages,
automated probes, or other signs of galactic intelligence to have arrived
from any single advanced civilization that chooses an expansionist
program. Explaining the Fermi paradox is a particularly great scientific
challenge if ours is a biofelicitous (life friendly) universe, as recent
astrobiological evidence suggests it to be (Davies 2004, 2007).

Proving the existence
and exclusivity of the transcension hypothesis with today’s science may
be impossible. Nevertheless, several early lines of evidence, and corresponding
SETI tests, can be offered in support of the idea. If we grossly define
"complexity" as the number of unique combinations of structure
and function expressed in a physical system, we can propose that the leading
edge of structural complexity over universal history has occupied ever
more spatially-restricted universal domains than its antecedents, a phenomenon
we may call the increasing "locality" (or perhaps, "multi-locality")
of complexity. A familiar history of physical complexity begins with universally
distributed early matter, leading next to large scale structure and superclusters,
then to the first galaxies, then to metal-rich replicating stars within
special galaxies, then to stellar habitable zones, then to prokaryotic
life existing on and around single planets in those zones (miles deep
in our crust, miles in the air, and evolved in situ or as planetary ejecta
on meteorites in near space), then to eukaryotic life inhabiting a far
more restricted domain of the special planet’s surface, then to human
civilizations living in yet more localized domains, then to humans (each
with 100 trillion unique synaptic connections) in industrial cities emerging
as the leading edge in those civilizations, and perhaps soon, to intelligent,
self-aware technology, which will have even more unique connectivity,
and inhabit, at least initially, a vastly more local subset of Earth’s
city space. Self-aware computers may themselves be able to enter far more
miniaturized and local nanocomputational domains. Thus, to a first approximation,
the increasing spatiotemporal locality of leading edge substrate emergence
looks like universal complexity heading toward transcension as it develops
(Smart 2008).

Now complex systems
do expand regularly into neighboring, or “next adjacent” spatial realms
during their evolutionary development, and during such brief expansions,
locality decreases briefly for the system under observation. Supernovas
reach distant domains of space, ocean life colonized land, humans colonized
much of the surface of Earth, intelligent robots will soon colonize our
solar system. But note that this type of expansion is always quite limited.
Systems at any fixed level of complexity do not expand continuously, or
at an accelerating rate. They expand until they reach their own systemic
or local environmental limits, or have produced the next level of complexity
development. Over universal history the increasing locality of the spatial
domain of the leading edge of complex systems is a far more prevalent
trend than the periodic next-adjacent spatial expansion in these systems,
and on first inspection, increasing locality seems a good candidate to
be a process of universal development.

A few evolutionary,
physical, and information theoretic reasons, mechanisms, and models for
constrained transcension have been proposed, and a few will now be briefly
examined. Smart (2000, 2002b, 2010), Chaisson (2001, 2003) and others
have noted that a special subset of our most recently evolved complex
systems display accelerating growth in both their computational capabilities
and the efficiencies and densities of their physical resource (Space,
Time, Energy and Matter, or STEM) inputs to computation. Accelerating
STEM efficiency and density growth at the leading edge of complexity can
be called STEM compression, the phenomenon of increasing spatial, temporal,
energetic, and material density and efficiency per computation in leading
edge systems over time. Aspects of this phenomenon have been described
in the literature as dematerialization (Ausubel et. al. 1996), ephemeralization
(Fuller 1938,1979,1981), time-space compression (Harvey 1989), miniaturization
(Gilbert 1961), densification (Leskovec et al. 2005), virtualization (Levy
1998, Blascovich and Bailenson 2011), digitization (Negroponte 1996, Polastron
2009), and simulation (NSF 2006). To date, no comprehensive theory of
this process has been advanced, yet we can observe and measure it from
each of these and other perspectives.

We have already noted
the increasing spatial locality (space density and efficiency) in leading
complex systems over universal history, and this phenomenon continues
to accelerate in human civilization today. As Glaeser (2010) notes, 243
million Americans, 79% of us, voluntarily crowd together in just the 3%
of our nation's space that is urban. Bettencourt et. al. (2010) document
the greatly superior per capita wealth generation, innovation, and sustainability
features of highest density megacities, and their ability to solve problems
of pollution, crime, and gridlock that periodically block further densification.
Yet while the world continues to urbanize, cities may no longer be the
leading edge of complexity per computation or information generated per
unit of space, time, energy, or matter. Some argue that corporations outperform
cities on information generation and computation per resource, and certainly
our new electronic devices and networks are even more STEM dense and efficient
per computation than anything so far seen on Earth, as we will see below.

Returning to a macroevolutionary
perspective and moving on from space to time, we can measure
the increasingly rapid temporal succession of significant complexity emergences
in cosmic, biological, and human history, the closer we approach the present
day. Adams (1909) and many successors have observed this accelerating
emergence pattern, popularized in the metaphor of the Cosmic Calendar
(Sagan 1977). Meyer (1947,54) and successors (Nottale et al. 2000a,b,
Johansen and Sornette 2001, Kurzweil 2005, Korotayev 2006) have built
simple empirical mathematical models of log-periodic emergence acceleration
in the history of life and human culture.

Energy flow
density acceleration at the leading edge of complex systems has been estimated
by Chaisson (2001,2003). He calls energy flow density a measure of the
dynamic complexity of the system being studied. The more complex the system,
the more this energy flow, or metabolism in living systems, may be a proxy
for the intrinsic rate of computation and learning occurring in the system.
Per Chaisson, a modern computer chip exhibits roughly ten million times
more energy rate density (energy flow per unit mass or volume) than a
human brain. It communicates and generates systemic information roughly
ten million times faster too (the speed of electricity versus the speed
of neural action potentials). While today's computers still lack our structural
or connectionist complexity, their vastly superior rate of learning suggests
that in the forseeable future they will attain and exceed our structural
complexity as well. Energy efficiency acceleration has also been shown
to be smoothly logarithmic for at least the last few hundred years, across
a broad variety of lighting, power, computation, and communications technologies
and nanotechnologies (Richards & Shaw 2004, Koh & Magee 2006,
2008). Fusion energy, the controlled collisions of atoms at the nano and
pico scale, promises energy densites three orders of magnitude greater
than fission, which in turn is three orders of magnitude greater than
chemical energy (fossil fuels). Along with solar, fusion may be the future
of centralized energy production in all advanced civilizations, a process
that captures the chemistry of our stars. Compared to fission, fusion
is a much more hyperlocal process of atomic control (Niele 2005). Note
also that the higher the energy flow density of any system, the closer
the system approaches the universal density limit—a black hole.

Matter density
and efficiency are also growing rapidly with time in leading edge systems.
Consider the growth in matter efficiency and density of computation that
was needed to produce biological cells. We think pre-life chemistry was
far less materially efficient and dense than the first cell (Orgel 1973).
DNA packing and unfolding machinery (histones, nucleosomes, etc.) in every
eukaryotic cell allows a massive increase in material efficiency and density
of genetic computation vs. earlier prokaryotic cells, which contain far
more primitive compression technology. Human and material flow efficiency
and density in a modern city is far greater than in pre-technologic cultures.
Material efficiency and density in ICT computing also grows rapidly, and
is increasingly led by mass- and energy-efficient Green ICT initiatives
(OECD 2009)

Computational performance
capabilities, as measured by information production, instructions per
second/energy/mass/volume, perception, action, and other measures, appears
to grow exponentially or greater at the leading edge of complex systems
(Nagy et. al. 2010). Computational acceleration measures are plentiful.
Bohn and Short (2009) and others have measured exponential growth in information
production in technological society. Nagy et al. have measured exponential
or greater growth in the computational outputs of market-leading technological
systems. Swenson and Turvey (1991) and others in ecological psychology
have measured long-term exponential growth in perception and action variables
in leading-edge living systems. Zotin (1984) has charted exponential growth
in respiration intensity (both an energetic and an action variable) in
higher organisms as a function of geologic time. Scholars of functional
performance capability metrics (Sahal 1979, Dutton and Thomas 1984, Koh
& Magee 2006, Nemet 2006, Yeh & Rubin 2007, McNerney et. al. 2009)
chart the accelerating capability of human-technological systems to produce
products with power-law declining resource inputs, yielding accelerating
increases in services or information output per resource input. While
the performance capability curve of each specific technology is often
logistic (Modis 2002), successive functional substitution of ever more
STEM efficient, miniaturized, and dense technologies yields an exponential
or greater second order trend. For an obvious example, while human transportation
through physical space has been in logistic saturation for decades, computational
complexity itself is subject to no such limits. It continually jumps to
more STEM efficient, dense, and virtual substrates (e.g., telepresence
vs. physical commuting).

Based partly on these
trends, the arrival of generally human-surpassing machine intelligence,
an event called the technological singularity, is expected by some as
an imminent development (Vinge 1993, Sandberg 2010). Science fiction authors
such as Stapledon (1937) and Asimov (1956), and philosopher scientists
such as Teilhard (1955) and Tipler (1997) have contemplated the idea of
accelerating complexification as a universal developmental process, and
universal intelligence's eventual arrival at an "omega point,"
representing the maximum complexity allowed by our universe's particular
physics. What is needed now is to update and further constrain such ideas
within a model of universal evolutionary development, a model that contrasts
a small subset of statistically predictable developmental processes with
the apparently much larger set of unpredictable evolutionary experiments
occurring within the universe, and perhaps, an understanding of our universe
as a finite system engaged in a developmental cycle within a multiversal
environment (Smolin 1994).

Expansion-oriented
scholars frequently refer to the Kardashev scale (1964,1997), which first
proposed that growth in a civilization’s total energy use (using first
a planet, then a sun, then a galaxy, then the universe's energy budget)
is a reasonable metric for development. But if transcension is the fate
of all advanced civilizations, total energy use would only be a proxy
for early civilization development, and a would be a misleading indicator
late in development. Total energy use cannot grow exponentially beyond
the energy budget of the civilization's star, unless such civilizations
enter black holes (inner space) and undergo extreme time dilation, a topic
we will discuss shortly. In normal (outer) space, we can expect a civilization's
energy use to grow logistically to the limit of local energy resources,
due to the vast distances between stars. Barrow (1998) has proposed an
anti-Kardashev scale, where the key metric is instead the miniaturization
(spatial localization) of a civilization’s engineering, perhaps terminating
at the Planck scale. Due to STEM compression, intelligent civilizations
can presumably continue to develop exponentially more localized, miniaturized,
dense, efficient and complex structures and energy flows to generate greater
computational and adaptive capacity, right up to the black hole limit
and presumably even beyond, as black hole event horizons in stellar mass
and supermassive black holes are still well above the apparent Planck-scale
limits of universal structure. Thus, if the hypothesis is correct, the
Barrow scale, and more generally, STEM efficiency, STEM density, and computational
growth scales would be much more appropriate measures of civilization
development.

Because of the superior
adaptive and innovative capabilities of systems at the leading edge of
universal complexity, and because the special physics of our universe
appears to support computing and physical transformation at ever-denser,
more miniaturized, and more STEM efficient (sustainable, virtual) scales,
our civilization’s present acceleration toward the black hole limit seems
likely to continue. So far, as each particular computing system has saturated
in its capabilities, new ones with ever greater miniaturization, energy
flow density, and efficiency have continually emerged. Visionary engineers
propose that future computation and future intelligence may use single
electron transistors, photonics, spintronics, etc. As Nagy et. al. (2010)
and others note, our technology capability performance metrics related
to computing, communications, and nanotechnologies have always been on
gently superexponential, perhaps even hyperbolic curves. Astonishingly,
if current trends continue, a physical limit to computational acceleration
must arrive just centuries, not millennia, from now. Quantum physicist
Seth Lloyd (2000a, 2001) proposed that we will arrive at the Planck scale
of computational miniaturization within the next 250-600 years, if acceleration
continues at historical rates. Krauss and Starkman (2004) make similar
calculations arriving at a 600 year limit to the continued acceleration
of Moore's law. Subjectively the transition might feel much longer, to
the hyperaccelerated intelligences of the postbiological Earth. Yet to
an observer in "normal" spacetime, transcension would occur
over an amazingly short period in astronomical time, a shortness with
major implications for SETI, as we will discuss.

Hans-Joachim Bremermann
(1962, 1965, 1982) was the first to calculate the maximum computational
speed of a self-contained system in the physical universe ("Bremermann's
limit"), using Einstein's mass-energy equivalency (c^2) and the
Planck constant (h). The value of the limit is c^2/h,
or 1.36 x 10^50 bits per second per kilogram. That is the apparent performance
limit of any "computronium" (computational matter,after Amato
1991) that a future intelligence might create in this physical universe.
Seth Lloyd,
applying the work of Bremermann, theorized that black holes (specifically,
their event horizons) are the “ultimate” computing environment, as only
at black hole energy densities does the “memory wall” of modern computing
disappear (2000a,b). In all classical computing, there is a time cost
to sending information from the processor to the memory register and back
again. At the black hole limit of STEM density, computers attain the Bekenstein
bound for the energy cost of information transfer (Bekenstein 1981), and
the time it takes to compute, or flip a bit (tflip) at any
position, is the same as the time it takes to communicate (tcom)
from any point in the system to any other around the event horizon. Serial
and parallel computational architectures can now work equivalently fast,
as communication and computation have become a convergently unified process
on the surface of black holes, making them a maximally STEM-efficient
learning system. Strange as it seems at first, that might be an incredibly
attractive eventual destination.

Local intelligence
would very likely need to be able to enter or construct a black hole without
losing any of its structural complexity. Hawking (1987) has speculated
we might do just this, if advanced intelligence is built out of some form
of femtotechnology (structures below the atom in size). There are twenty
five orders of magnitude of “undiscovered country” in scale between atoms
(10-10 m)
and the Planck length (10-35 m)
for the possible future creation of intelligent systems. Inner space engineering
may one day occur within this vast range, which is almost as broad as
the thirty orders of scale presently inhabited by biological life.

Just as curiously,
due to the nonintuitive properties of general relativity, black holes
are near-instantaneous one-way information collection (to the hole, almost
exclusively) and time travel (to the future only) devices. Because of
the gravitational time dilation, nonlocal time flows slower for all objects
experiencing any gravitional field, and it flows vastly slower
externally the closer you approach a black hole. Thus a highly dense,
miniaturized, and intelligent civilization sitting just above the event
horizon of a black hole would merge nearly instantaneously, from
their unique time-dilated reference frame, with all other black holes
that are in their local gravity wells in the universe (Thorne 1994). Recall
the college physics example of the astronaut falling into a black hole,
who, the closer he gets to the hole, seems to slow down, from our reference
frame. Eventually his image is frozen at the event horizon, staying for
a near-eternity, to external observers. From the astronaut's reference
frame, time goes no faster in his local vicinity, but everything in the
external universe speeds up incredibly the closer he gets to the horizon,
eventually going near-instantaneously fast (Taylor and Wheeler 2000).
He sees remaining universal dynamics play out almost immediately. While
the physics of black holes themselves is a strange and still-unsettled
topic (Susskind 2008), it seems reasonable to this author that given time
dilation as we approach black holes under standard relativity
theory, black-hole-dense objects themselves should also experience instantaneous
(or near-instantaneous, as infinities don’t make sense in physical
systems) forward time travel with respect to the universe.

It is also possible
that advanced civilizations rather than "entering" a local black
hole, rather embed themselves, like flies to flypaper, as "information
structures" on its computationally optimal surface. One leading version
of the current information theory of black holes proposes that a complete
description of all information that enters any black hole must be contained
on its surface, in the 2D information structure of its event horizon.
The most general version of this postulate is known as the holographic
principle in string theory (Bousso 2002). It proposes that all 3D
physical activity in the universe can also be represented as a 2D information
structure embedded in the universe’s cosmological horizon (outer
accessible boundary), and on the surface of black holes. It is too early
to know if all universal information and physics are related in this conceptually
simple and elegant way, yet it is promising avenue of research.

Using current measurements
of dark energy acceleration in between galaxies, a repulsive effect that
appears to be subdividing our universe into informationally-disconnected
islands, but which is also overwhelmed by gravitational attraction between
local galactic clusters, Nagamine and Loeb 2003 tell us that our Milky
Way galaxy will merge with the Andromeda galaxy in just tens to a few
hundred billions of years, and all black holes within each galaxy, including
the supermassives at the core of each galaxy, will merge in a few hundred
billion years thereafter. But because of gravitational time dilation,
these mergers will occur near-instantaneously to all observers in the
reference frame of black hole time. Again, whether this effect occurs
inside the event horizon of a black hole, as well as on the event horizon
itself, is not clear in physics today, as far as I can tell. But what
is clear is that all the matter in all galaxies will end up inside merged
black holes (Lehners et. al. 2009).

A black hole is the
last place you want to be if you are still trying to create (evolve) in
the universe, but this seems exactly where you want to be if you have
reached the asymptote of complexity development in outer (normal) space,
have employed all local STEM resources to create the most dense and efficient
non-relativistic computational substrate (computronium) possible, and
are now finding the observable universe to be an increasingly ergodic
(repetitive, uninformative) and senescent or saturated learning environment,
relative to you. In other words, the more computationally closed local
computing and discovery become, and the more complex you become relative
to the nondense regions of the universe, the faster you want the nonlocal
universe to run to transfer the last bits of useful nonlocal information
to yourself in the shortest amount of local time.

Furthermore, as Eshleman
(1979, 1991), Maccone (1992, 1998) and others propose, massive objects
like our sun are great telescopes for gravitational lensing, for collecting
nonlocal information about the universe. Sensors in orbit at a stellar
focal distance of 550 AU from our sun would have very high quality nonlocal
information streaming into them. Maccone has estimated that such a telescope
would allow us to observe planets across our galaxy as if they were in
our own solar system, and detect and analyze the faintest EM signals.
But as Vidal (2010b) has noted, the resources of our parent star, if absorbed
into a black hole instead, would allow an even better telescope to be
produced, one with a focal distance only a few kilometers away from the
hole (Maccone 2010), and thus the ability to field a far higher density
of sensors. Should an intelligent civilization, prior to its final formation
as a black hole, construct a focal sphere of tiny orbiting sensors
at the appropriate focal distance in normal space, the sensors would stream
the ultimate high resolution movie of all future universal activity into
it as it instantaneously headed to its gravitationally-determined merger
point. Thus we may call the black hole focal sphere an "ultimate
learning device," as it would capture as much remaining nonlocal
information as may be theoretically possible, in the shortest local time
possible, allowing all black hole civilizations to record remaining universal
reality as fast as possible, then update their perennially imperfect and
incomplete models as best as possible prior to interaction with other
civilizations.

Finally, very slow
accretion of matter into a supermassive black hole, such as occurs in
now-quiescent supermassives like Sagittarius A* at our galactic center,
is perhaps the most efficient energy harvesting process presently known
in our universe (Frank et. al. 2000). The thin class of accretion disks
observed around some stellar-mass black holes are also the most efficient
presently known local harvesters, as much as 50 times as efficient as
stellar nuclear fusion (Narayan and Quataert 2005). If an intelligent
civilization desired to maximize the STEM efficiency of its remaining
pre-merger computations in the process of black hole formation, as seems
likely, slow accretion of the gases of the parent star would seem to be
an ideal developmental path. As Vidal (2010b) proposes, high-efficiency
or other unusual routes of black hole formation, if otherwise unexpected
and observed only in a special class of black holes, may be evidence of
intelligent rather than classical processes of formation.

Now imagine you are
an advanced future civilization in our solar system. You have rearranged
your solar system's matter and energy into exponentially more STEM efficient,
dense, and adaptive types of computing substrates over time. You have
transitioned from postbiological life emerging at a singular point on
Earth (Vinge 1993), to an integrated global brain (Bloom 2000, Heylighen
2007), and perhaps next to a Jupiter brain (Clarke 1982; Sandberg 1999),
exponentially harvesting the matter of your local gas giants (Jupiter
and Saturn for us) and other planets, via some form of self-replicating
nanomachinery, and turning it all into computronium. You might spare your
home world briefly prior to uploading it (Broderick 2002), but in the
long run, you would likely collect all easily accessible nonsolar matter
and convert it to a multi-planet mass entity with a very high density,
one that still allows you to enter normal space. You would probably be
something like an artificial neutron star (Forward 1980), with a metabolism
and brain operating at femtosecond speeds. Once you have reached this
near physical limit of computational miniaturization and easy access to
new mass, your long history of superexponential acceleration must stop,
due to the speed of light barrier and the astronomical distances between
you and other resources. At this unique point in evolutionary development,
the only way your civilization can continue to accelerate is to compress
itself further, all the way to a black hole, perhaps leaving a small shell
of normal matter around yourself to create a focal sphere, to relay high-quality
observations of the universe as it progressively merges and dies.

If, after black hole
accretion, stellar fusion is the highest yield energy production process
intelligence can control in our universe, as some have suggested (Harris
2008), then there seems to be no value to "star
lifting", the repurposing of a star's matter-energy for intelligent
uses (Criswell 1985), other than by passive accretion into the hole. Intelligences
could be expected to slowly accrete the mass of their parent star, rather
than lifting or collapsing that mass and then inefficiently recreating
fusion within the black hole (if the laws of physics even allow the latter,
which they may not). In other words, you might absorb your star in a passive
and gravitationally-driven process that would look a lot like a low mass
X-ray binary (LMXRB) system to external observers, but in which the black
hole companion begins as a planet mass black hole on the order of 1000
times less massive than the star companion, which should be a main-sequence
star, likely with a spectral class G, like our Sun.

Approximately 100 LMXRBs
have been discovered in our galaxy to date, and about 13 of these have
been found in the globular clusters, areas at the rim of our galaxy that
may not harbor intelligence. They have also been found in many distant
galaxies, again often in globular clusters. Few have involved G class
stars, and none have yet been discovered with the very high, 1,000:1 mass
ratio the hypothesis appears to predict. This may simply be a problem
of detection. XRBs emit X-rays only when they are "eating" their
companion sun, a transient phenomenon. Chandra, our best X-ray
observatory, may also not have the sensitivity or persistence needed to
detect very high mass ratio LMXRBs, or those that absorb their star's
matter very infrequently or in very small doses. More research and theory
is needed in this area.

Returning to your perspective
as a newly created intelligent black hole, one of extreme gravitationally
induced time-dilation, you would near-immediately absorb your star's mass-energy,
and then rapidly and passively merge with all the other intelligent black
holes in your vicinity (Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies, for us). If
each of these civilizations is computationally unique and incomplete,
this would appear to be an ideal universal mechanism to allow further
competition, cooperation, and natural selection at the merger point. Black
hole creation and passive merger can thus be seen as an attractive and
potentially developmentally-constrained destination for all sufficiently
advanced intelligences in universes with our physics.

Black holes may not
only be ideal attractors of advanced complexity, there is also early evidence
that they may be ideal seeds or replicators of universes within
an environmental structure called the multiverse. Lee Smolin’s hypothesis
of Cosmological
Natural Selection (1992, 1994, 1997, 2006) makes this claim. In the
1980’s, theorists in quantum gravity began postulating that our universe
might give birth to new universes via fluctuations in spacetime over very
short distances (Baum 1983; Strominger 1984; Hawking 1987, 1988, 1993;
Coleman 1988). Some (Hawking 1987; Frolov 1989) proposed that new universe
creation might be particularly likely at the central “singularity” inside
black holes. The singularity is a region where our equations of relativity
fail to hold, depicting energy and space at improbably “infinite” densities.
In Smolin’s model, what occurs there is a “bounce” that produces a new
daughter universe, one with fundamental parameters that are stochastically
different from the parent universe.

Furthermore, Smolin
(1997) noticed that fundamental parameters fall into two groups. He found
that eight changes in a few of the twenty (by his count) fundamental parameters
presently known in our standard model of physics (empirically-derived
particle masses, matrix parameters, and a variety of constants), are fine-tuned
to produce black hole fecundity (universes with trillions of black holes),
and universe longevity, and complexity (multi-billion year universe lifespans,
capable of complex internal life). These special parameters would thus
be highly conserved in replication of complex universes. That would make
them developmental (in evo devo language), a topic known to theorists
as the fine-tuning problem. Other fundamental parameters, per Smolin and
others, do not appear to be sensitively tuned for universal fecundity,
longevity, and complexity, but rather create phenotypically different
universes, which are all black hole fecund, long-lived, and complexity-permitting.
By analogy with biology, this second group can be considered evolutionary
parameters (again in evo devo language, not Smolin’s). In this scenario,
each universal civilization may be in the process of turning into something
analogous to a seed, a developmental structure that packages its evolutionary
history and experience in a way that transcends our apparently finite
and potentially dying universe, just as seeds transcend finite and dying
biological bodies. An equivalent biological analogy for our universe itself
might be an ovarian follicle, a developmental structure that assembles
many potential seeds and puts them in a competitive selective system to
generate the best new seed.
From this perspective, black holes are a way for the universe to reliably
change its topology (a key developmental process) over its life cycle,
rapidly and efficiently merging both its simpler replicative systems (classical
black holes) and more complex replicative systems ("intelligent"
black holes) as maturity approaches.

Fortunately, such claims
are increasingly testable by scientific simulation. Just as we are beginning
to construct phylogenetic trees of living systems, which allow us to discriminate
between developmental (highly-conserved) and evolutionary (variable) gene
complexes, we are now beginning to construct cladistic trees of universe
morphology, which may allow us to discriminate between conserved and variable
fundamental parameters. We are early in such work, and most potential
universal variants, and the ways that their laws emerge, perhaps via symmetry-breaking,
remain mostly beyond simulation today. But as physical theory and computers
advance, simulation testing of universe phylogenetics models may become
increasingly informative.

In biological systems,
intelligence transcends the senescing body via replication, through the
“immortal” germline tissue. In universal systems, intelligence may transcend
the senescing body of our universe via replication as well, using intelligence-collecting
black holes as “immortal” germline devices. Gardner (2000, 2003, 2007)
has also proposed advanced intelligence as the replicator of our universe,
but his intriguing work does not require the black hole mechanism, or
evo devo dynamics. If the transcension hypothesis is correct, inner space,
not outer space, is the final frontier for universal intelligence. Our
destiny is density.

To
recap, if ours is an evolutionary developmental universe, all civilizations
are engaged in two fundamental processes: 1) unpredictable, and often
reversible experimentation, innovation and diversity generation (evolution)
and 2) a predictable, constrained, and often irreversible, complexity-sustaining
life cycle, that accelerates toward universal replication (development).
Note that very different types of messaging occur in these two processes.
Evolutionary processes require two-way communication. Competition,
cooperation, and natural selection all require constant feedback and adjustment
of the message to the local environment. Developmental processes, by contrast,
use one-way communication (from the genes to the organism and environment),
and the message is not altered by the local environment within any life
cycle. One-way communication standardizes, unifies, and controls, it does
not generate local variety. For example, developmental genes specify somatic
development in top-down, one-way fashion, including life cycle progression
and many aspects of organism behavior. To understand the uncanny strength
of developmental constraints on behavior, look at studies of human identical
twins that were separated at birth.

Top-down, one-way,
global control (development) is needed in any evo devo system, but in
genetics, this is perhaps 2-5% of the system. The vast majority of change
occurs by bottom-up, two-way, local control. Consider centrally planned,
command economies, dominated by one-way communication from the government.
A certain degree (2-5%?) of central planning is always needed, and this
need for control and variety-reduction increases during a crisis, but
on average, centrally planned economies are outcompeted by ones that locally
self-organize their own laws, markets, and prices via two-way, evolutionary
communications. As in life, evolutionary experimentation may be the primary
process of the universe. As in life, universal development may provide
only the special, standardized framework within which evolution
occurs.

Given these insights,
we may propose that if the closest receiving civilization for a METI (message
to extraterrestrial intelligence) beacon is on average 100 light years
away, by the time any technology-using civilization can send a message,
their local evolution will be proceeding so fast that the send-receive
cycle (200 years) will be far too long to aid in local evolutionary complexity
construction. In other words, the special self-organization of our universe,
with its speed of light limit and the great gulf between intelligent civilizations
allows only developmental messages over interstellar distances. Such one-way
messages are useful only for control and constraint, not for innovation
or complexity construction. The vast light-distances between civilizations,
their continuous local acceleration via STEM compression, and the curious
time-travel properties of black holes together suggest the great unlikelihood
of any civilization communicating through normal “slowspace”on their way
to their respective transcensions. For example, assume that we immediately
discover evidence of life on a planet 100 light years distant. If it takes
an average of 600 years for each civilization to be able to enter a local
black hole, we could conduct a maximum of three two-way information
exchanges before one of us transcended. Due to this severe two-way messaging
limit in normal space, such communication would be a very rare, very local,
and short-lived phenomenon.

But interstellar communication
may be even rarer than this. Assume that our future science discovers
that we live in an evo devo universe constrained to transcension, and
that all civilizations will be computationally incomplete (not “Gods”,
see Gödel 1934) and evolutionarily diverse. We may then be able to prove,
using information theory, that sending one-way METI or probes containing
simple information (already known to the sender) is not worth the cost
to send, and sending advanced information or probes will only reduce the
evolutionary diversity in all civilizations receiving and implementing
the message. Consider the likelihood that anyadvanced information
we sent to other civilizations would just push them into their black hole
transcension in a more clonal way, and we’d meet significantly less-interesting
and less-useful “copies of ourselves” in our later merger, a fate we might
seek to avoid by all reasonable means. One of the key lessons evolutionary
development teaches us is that evolution abhors monocultures and clonality
wherever it arises. Variety is evolution’s central signature. Monocultures
are sterile, static, and far more susceptible to disease. Some clonality
exists in lower organisms (hydra, sponges, etc) but it rapidly becomes
rarer as complexity increases, perhaps because the evolutionary cost of
clonality (the reduction in expressed variation) is so much higher in
complex organisms.

Enforcing
our own particular evolutionary path to transcension on other civilizations,
via one-way transmission of messages or probes containing our learnings,
would condemn them, if they were less advanced than us, to transcending
in substantially the same way we did, by significantly decreasing the
remaining variability of their evolutionary paths. The equations we send
them would be imperfect, as we would not be "Gods", but finite
computational beings, and the way we frame universal knowledge would be
from our own unique and necessarily incomplete world view. If all
complex cultures are morally bound to follow Dick’s (2003) Intelligence
Principle, and thus to maximize their civilization’s and the universe's
intelligence, with a moral strength proportional to their complexity,
then civilizations receiving one-way METI in a universe with transcension
physics would be bound to do one of two things: 1) ignore the message,
if they were wise enough or 2) listen to the communication and thereby
jump their complexity, taking them much closer to the black hole/merger
point in a single step. In the latter case, we would have cheated them
out of their own evolutionary search for unique solutions, and the evolutionary
path from where they were beforehand to the complexity level represented
in our message would no longer be evolutionary, but would look very much
like ours. As scholars remind us (Diamond 1999; Putnam 2001; Harrison
2008), whenever more scientifically and technologically advanced cultures
have have had extensive contact with less advanced cultures in human history,
the latter have always lost major elements of their unique languages,
culture, and scientific and technological uniqueness in the merger. As
Baxter (2011) reports, no less a SETI-thinker than Arthur C. Clarke (1992)
apparently considered this potential loss of diversity when he mused,
“It might be better, in the long run, for us to acquire knowledge by our
own efforts, rather than be spoon-fed”.

One could imagine these
receiving civilizations might still want to explore “all possible evolutionary
paths” prior to transcension. But could they? Their computational resources
will be finite, and their simulations incomplete. Moreover, to attempt
to do so, they would have to stop their developmental acceleration. In
the transcension hypothesis, and in biological development, acceleration
(sustained positive feedback) is a key feature of the path to replication.
The rest of the lifecycle runs on either deceleration (normal growth)
or equilibrium with negative feedback (homeostasis). For example, the
first phase of biological growth, from fertilized zygote to prepubescent
adult, is a long physiological and energy flow deceleration. But once
puberty starts, the path to replication is unavoidably accelerative. Consider
the behavioral accelerations in courtship that lead to mate selection,
the chemical accelerations that produce the Graafian follicle every 30
days in the mammalian female, the sexual accelerations leading to insemination,
and the sperm competition accelerations leading to fertilization. Likewise,
from the fast, hot Big Bang to the formation of the first galaxies, our
universe at first decelerated in structural and functional emergence.
But for roughly the last ten billion years, our leading-edge systems have
been accelerating in structural and functional complexity emergence, as
represented by Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar metaphor. If our universe’s intelligence
is on a developmental path to replication, and intelligent life is a key
part of the replicative mechanism, it may have precious little capacity
to suspend that acceleration.

The Cosmic
Calendar: 13.7 Billion Years of at first Decelerative, and then
Accelerative Universal History, Depicted Over A Cosmic "Year".
Lovely creative commons image by Wikipedia author Eric
Fisk.

If our universe
has self-organized, perhaps through multiple prior iterations in the multiverse,
to support massively parallel evolutionary computations of reality, with
each civilization isolated by vast gulfs of space and time precisely in
order to maximize the uniqueness of local computation, and if
it is dominated by continuous local acceleration followed by instantaneous
civilization merger and natural selection, then one-way non-local
information transmissions may in fact always be provably destructive of
variety by future information theory. As a result, a type of "Prime
Directive" against one-way non-local messaging would seem likely
to be a moral development emerging in all sufficiently advanced civilizations,
once they recognize that they are on course to a black hole destiny. A
variation of this idea in the Fermi paradox literature is called the zoo
hypothesis (Ball 1973), the idea that advanced civilizations avoid
contact with less advanced civilizations so that they do not influence
their evolutionary development. The transcension hypothesis is thus a
specific variant of the zoo hypothesis. The zoo hypothesis proposes that
the last variable in the Drake equation for METI (Drake 1961), L, the
length of time that technologically capable civilizations are motivated
to send one-way messages is exceedingly short, with weak messages sent
only by very early technological civilizations (Earth today), and with
probes later rarely if ever sent, for the reasons discussed.

Could an advanced civilization
improve the total intelligence of the universe by sending interstellar
nanoprobes or other highly miniaturized technology to monitor all developing
cultures and, if necessary, intervene subtly and undetectably in such
cultures in cases where they would otherwise perish through no fault of
their own? Perhaps. But only if the natural processes of intelligence
and diversity development were so defective or dangerous that the vast
effort and risk of such intervention were justified. To this author, given
the smoothness and predictability of local acceleration of complexity
to date, the universe seems to be doing a very, very good job of protecting
accelerating complexity development. No intelligent intervention seems
necessary or prudent. Note furthermore that the clandestine monitoring
program, even if it were true, means little to us as a matter of science
or practice, as to be morally defensible it must be undetectable, except
perhaps in rare cases of failure (note: great science fiction plot here).
If such a program existed, it would be an intelligent augmentation of
natural processes of developmental immunity, a topic will discuss in our
final section. But far more important and relevant to science than determining
whether intelligence-guided immunity exists is the determination of whether
an extensive degree of universe-guided developmental immunity already
exists in our current physics, as the transcension hypothesis claims.

7.
SETI Implications: Evidence of Transcension May Be Emanating from Earth-Like
Planets

Fortunately, directed
search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) can provide some empirical
tests of the transcension hypothesis. The hypothesis predicts regular
cessation of weak, unintentionally-emitting communication signals (“leakage
signals” of radar, radio, TV, etc.) emanating from all early technological
civilizations soon after they develop the ability to use electromagnetic
communications technology. For humans, this period may be as short as
200 years (Smart 2002a). The hypothesis further predicts that an astronomically
short time later these civilizations would reorganize their solar system's
planetary matter to achieve vastly greater STEM density, efficiency, and
computational capability, a transition we may call a developmental singularity
(Smart 2008). If computational acceleration continues at its present superexponential
rates (Nagy et. al. 2010), an asymptote to this acceleration must soon
be reached. If Lloyd's and Krauss and Starkman's calculations of a 600
year limit for Moore's law are roughly correct, then just 400 years after
radio silence, each intelligent civilization may suddenly, from our perspective,
reorganize itself into near-black hole dense matter. Specific steps along
the STEM compression pathway might vary a bit from civilization to civilization,
but what seems clear is that a rapid increase in density must happen,
perhaps only a few hundred years after radio silence occurs.

Thus, even though we
seem very likely to live in a biofelicitous universe, with perhaps millions
of Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone, when we look for signs of their
intelligence they should be very rare indeed. We can expect that early
civilizations would all emit leakage signals, perhaps most commonly in
the low frequency range (tens to hundreds of megahertz, where Earth television
and radar commonly broadcast). We can also expect that they would likely
construct early and weak METI mini-beacons of the type that we have constructed
so far on Earth. But if transcension is correct, later civilizations would
never construct advanced beacons, because if they did, such a message
would provably reduce, in a future information theory, the evolutionary
complexity of all civilizations receiving it.

Regular cessation of
leakage signals and METI would thus be common in a life-ubiquitous universe
under transcension physics. Smart 2002a estimates that in our galaxy alone,
if there are 2 million to 2 billion civilizations our age or older in
the Milky Way, occupying the galactic habitable zone, a ring of stars
around our galaxy's core, then assuming a 200 year signal lifespan we
should currently be able to detect anywhere from 20 to 20,000 low power
leakage signals in our sky, if we had a radiotelescope sensitive enough
to survey the entire galaxy. On average 0.1 to 100 of these would be in
their last year of transmission prior to transcension. One would cease
transmitting every four days to ten years, and if the cessation curve
was predictable in space and time, this would be experimental evidence
of a developmental transcension hypothesis.

Unfortunately, we are
unlikely to build radiotelescopes with the ability to detect our first
leakage signal soon. Loeb and Zaldarriaga (2007) propose that the Murchison
Wide-Field Array in Australia, presently under construction, might detect
leakage signals from the nearest thirty light years. But this includes
only 11 G-type stars, a discouragingly small population. Forgan and Nichol
(2010) propose that the Square Kilometer Array, which may come online
in 2019, might detect such signals from the nearst 300 light years (~1,000
G-type stars). But as they point out, Earth was "radio loud"
for only ~100 years, before becoming "radio quiet". On Earth,
we've already moved most of our communications to the much higher bandwidth
inner space domain of fiber optics, a development that seems likely to
be universal and irreversible, considered from the standpoint of STEM
compression. They estimate an average radio loud leakage window of only
100 years, and argue that SKA detection probability may be as low as 10^-7.
Moreover, Benford (2010) proposes their estimates of leakage detectability
are systematically high, due to overestimates of signal strength and integration
time. Radiotelescope based SETI may thus take several more decades to
yield fruit, and might require much larger ground based arrays, or even
space-based arrays, such as the one proposed by Heidmann (1993) for the
Saha crater on the far side of the moon.

Optical SETI, by contrast,
appears to offer a much higher likelihood of early success. Our present
exoplanet hunters such as the ESA's Gaia mission, to be launched in 2013,
will use photometry (slight dimming of the star during planetary transits)
to seek exoplanets within 200 parsecs (670 light years) of Earth, more
than twice the critical distance of the SKA. But most importantly, with
optical SETI we are not looking for a narrow 100-200 year leakage window,
but are mapping a binary event across all stars: the existence or nonexistence
of Earth-like planets exhibiting signs of life, their distribution in
the galaxy, and the way this binary state changes with time.

We now have a few optical
methods that can be used for detection of exoplanet atmosphere, such as
polarimetry changes during transits. If transcension is an inevitable
developmental attractor for intelligence, both planetary and atmospheric
signatures (transit photometry, orbital phase, polarimetry, etc.) and
life signatures (oxygen and methane lines, electromagnetic leakage signals,
etc.) must disappear from intelligent planets when they collapse themselves
into inner space. In a collapse, most of the planet's mass may remain
(some energy must also be expended, but not much in highly efficient systems),
and their parent star will continue to undergo small radial velocity changes
due to the gravitational effect of planetary orbit. This is detectable
on Doppler spectroscopy out to about 160 light-years from Earth by our
best ground-based telescopes today. But in collapsed planets there will
no longer be a photometry change during transit. Also, the great density
of the collapsed planet may create a telltale gravitational lensing signature
during transit.

The transcension hypothesis
seems to make a few more specific and falsifiable SETI predictions. First,
optical SETI should allow us to discover evidence of what we may now call
a galactic transcension zone, an inner ring of each galactic habitable
zone that contains far older planets that have long ago transcended and
collapsed themselves to near black hole or black hole densities. We might
call this a forthcoming "missing planets problem," an absence
or a much lower frequency of life-signature exoplanets observed in the
inner rings of the habitable zone. Second, we should discover a well-defined
outward growing edge of the transcension zone, where intelligent planets
of the right age and distance from the galactic core regularly flip their
states and become highly STEM dense objects. Third, we should discover
that Earth is near the outward edge of the transcension zone, as we appear
to be within a millennium of our own transcension, assuming this event
coincides with reaching the local limits of the "Moore's law acceleration,"
referred to earlier.

Finally, we may find
black hole dynamics in post-transcension solar systems that seem potentially
artificial, such as low mass X-ray binaries with a companion star of spectral
type G, and an extreme mass ratio of 1000 to 1, such as would occur if
a Jupiter-mass black hole began accreting our parent sun. We might even
find active black hole migration toward the galactic center, or other
unusual processes. With luck and hard work, our existing exoplanet hunters
might be a decade or less away from being able to discover a missing planets
problem, if one exists, to map the outward-growing edge of the transcension
zone, whose nearest edge may be within 600 light years of Earth, if one
exists, and to make other discoveries that would be consistent with transcension.
We shall see.

When we consider the
accelerating processes of STEM density, STEM efficiency, and computational
capability growth that appear to be leading civilizations toward transcension,
we must ask why these curves hold across so many types of physical systems
and such long spans of historical time. Why do we not see more fluctuations
in the J-curve of energy rate density flow in leading-edge systems across
cosmological time (Chaisson 2001)? Or in the J-curve of GDP per capita
in Western Europe between 1000 and 2000 AD (Maddison 2007)? Or in the
J-curve of price-performance of computing and communications technology
from the 1800s to 2010 (Kurzweil 1999,2005, Nordhaus 2007, Magee 2009,
Nagy et. al. 2010)?

If accelerating leading
edge computational capabilities (intelligence emergence) is part of the
developmental “genes” (special initial conditions, parameters, and laws)
of our universe, then the ability to access ever greater STEM densities
and efficiencies to produce such intelligence must also be a developmental
process. In biology, developmental processes become increasingly smooth
and resilient as they progress along the life cycle toward replication.
The more computationally complex the living system becomes prior to its
senescence, the more adaptive strategies and pathways it can use to find
the next, more STEM efficient and STEM dense physical substrate, if one
exists in universal phase space. In biology, developmental failure rates
can be very high at birth, but they drop drastically as development progresses.
Initially, many seeds (gametes) are sown, and very few (or just one) take
hold. Then, as zygotic growth begins, spontaneous abortions occur very
frequently in the first few days and weeks, but developmental failure
(miscarriage) rates drop rapidly thereafter (Goldhaber and Fireman 1991).
Even after birth, the closer multicellular organisms get to their sexual
maturity, the lower their annual mortality risk (Olshansky and Carnes
1997). It is possible that in living systems, the closer development gets
to the replication point in any life cycle, and the greater the number
of completed cycles since emergence of the first replicator, the more
mechanisms of developmental immunity may buffer against both internal
and external sources of disruption. For example, consider how predictably
and concurrently two genetically identical twins will hit their developmental
milestones. Again, we do not find such smoothness in evolutionary processes,
which are defined by chaotic diversity, disruption, punctuation, and creativity.

If developmental immunity
exists at the scale of the universe, natural physical processes protecting
accelerating complexification and transcension, we will increasingly be
able to find evidence for it. At scales larger than humanity, we can find
immunity candidates in the unreasonably life-friendly nature of the universe
as a system (Davies 2004), and in Earth’s geophysical systems, as characterized
in the Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock and Margulis 1974). Gaia is a controversial
topic, but it might make physical sense if our universe’s developmental
physics have self-organized, perhaps over many previous universal life
cycles in the multiverse, to provide geological and climatological homeostasis
on special planets, and thereby greatly increase life’s resilience. Bostrom
et. al. (2008) and others have written on the possibility of existential
risks, events or processes that might lead to human extinction in coming
centuries. I have argued (Smart 2008) just how unreasonably low these
existential risks (species-killing meteorites, solar flares, gamma ray
bursts, pandemics, wars, etc.) appear to be. Furthermore, all previous
Earth catastrophes appear to have only catalyzed the acceleration, and
presumably the statistical immunity, of complexity development. For example,
no metazoan genes were likely lost in the K-T meteorite catastrophe, rather
metazoan phenotypes were pruned, and much new mammalian morphological
complexity emerged immediately afterward. Once we have transitioned to
postbiological life (Dick 2003), we can presume our immunity to astrophysical
events will take yet another major leap forward in resilience/immunity
(Smart 2008).

Even at the human scale,
where evolutionary variation surrounds us, and where universal developmental
processes may be hardest to see, social morality, and the moderating effects
of increased technological complexity on human societies (Inglehart and
Welzel 2005), show the signs of being developmental. Even as the intensity
and scope of individual acts of violence has steadily increased with the
advent of modern technology, a number of scholars (Elias
1978, Gurr 1981, Stone 1983,1985; Sharp 1985;
Pinker 2011) have documented the progressive reduction in the average
frequency and severity of violence in developing human societies since
the Enlightenment (1600-1800s). This pattern is particularly pronounced
in the sixty years since our two world wars (Human Security Report 2010;
Goldstein 2011). Behavioral psychologists document that human beings are
in general surprisingly civil to each other, and with rare exception,
their expressions of violence are both short-lived and largely symbolic,
even under conditions of great deprivation and duress. The rare cases
we see of sustained sociopathologies and of sustained warfare and civil
conflict are curiously self-limiting in their effect (Gintis 2005). Furthermore,
the level of technologically aided transparency and immunity we can foresee
permeating our planet in coming decades will be astounding (Brin 1998b).
Assuming superethical AI's are in charge, any actions taken by violent,
criminal, or impulsive biohumans may be detected and counteracted long
before they can become a global problem.

As we contemplate the
future of our increasingly lifelike technologies, is hard to imagine their
consciousness, feelings, empathy, and moral constraints. Yet if morality
and immunity are developmental processes, if they arise inevitably in
all intelligent collectives as a type of positive sum game (Ridley 1998,
Wright 1997, 2000), they must also grow in force and extent as each civilization’s
computational capacity grows. Each civilization has and needs individual
moral deviants (Bloom 1995), but in all developmental processes, such
deviancy gets profoundly better regulated with time. While evolutionary
process is best characterized by divergence and speciation, the hallmark
of developmental processes is convergence and unification. A planet
of postbiological life forms, if subject to universal development, may
increasingly look like one integrated organism, and if so, its
entities will be vastly more responsible, regulated, and self-restrained
than human beings. If developmental immunity exists, planetary transitions
from life to intelligent life, and from intelligent life to postbiological
life should be increasingly high-probability. The exact probabilities
of each of these transitions also seems likely to be empirically measurable
by future astrobiology and SETI.

How might SETI measure
the average probability of transition from a civilization like ours to
a developmental singularity? Consider two likely scenarios for our future
in an evo devo universe: failure to transcend, due to an insurmountable
resource or other block to progress or self-destruction, sometimes called
the Great Filter hypothesis (Hanson 1996), or successful transcension.
Evo devo theory would argue that the failure scenarios are all a result
of evolutionary variation disrupting a developmental process, and the
success scenario is a result of development resisting evolutionary perturbations
(Smart 2008). As any biologist who has attempted genetic engineering knows,
almost every mutation one introduces by experiment, or guided by current
theory, is deleterious, particularly in developmental genes, which are
highly conserved. In other words, the ways to fail developmentally are
many, and unpredictable, while the ways to succeed are few, and highly
predictable. As Tolstoy (1877) famously said: "Happy families are
all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Quantitatively,
developmental processes in biological systems are guided toward a normal
or log-normal distribution of the phenotype (e.g., height, blood pressure,
IQ, multicellular pattern, etc.) in parameter space (Giurumescu et. al.
2009). Development seeks to hit a future structural and functional target,
and will fall off narrowly to each side of it in a statistically predictable
way. Evolutionary processes, by contrast, are stochastic (Champagnat et.
al. 2005). Their outputs, and thus their failure modes, are creative and
stochastic, or random within constraints. The size of the constraint envelope
can be predictable, but the failure instances within the envelope will
be unpredictably unique. Therefore, if evolutionary processes contribute
significantly to transcension, many transcensions should occur stochastically
in time and space within the galactic transcension zone (the constraint
envelope). Some of these in fact might be evolutionary failures, not trancensions,
and sorting the two might be difficult. Furthermore, we should expect
some failures that involve METI or interstellar expansion rather than
transcension. If our galaxy is biofelicitous, the fact that we have not
seen either to date (unless you take stock in ufologists, which I do not)
argues that evolution is subservient to development in this case. If developmental
processes are the dominant component of transcension, we should expect
the galactic transcension zone to be well defined, and transcensions to
occur in an orderly fashion within the zone, with a normal or log-normal
distribution in space, time, and other phenotypic parameters at the outward-growing
edge of the zone. It is this signature, if it exists, that would allow
us to calculate a robust, resilient developmental process, and a high
probability of transcension in each individual case.

In a universe run by
transcension physics, committed messaging and spacefaring civilizations
would be developmental failures, statistically very rare late in the life
cycle of developing systems. Such civilizations would either consciously
know that they are doing damage by messaging and sending probes, and would
attempt to rationalize and legitimize this morally dissonant behavior
(for a variant of this scenario, see Clarke 1953), or they would be too
simple to know this, in which case they would not get very far before
they got smart enough to understand the damage they were doing. David
Brin, a careful thinker on the Fermi paradox and author of the first broad
review the topic (1983) notes that Biker Gangs and other groups on Earth
are cheerfully happy to contravene any social standard, and they are a
good analogy for why the transcension hypothesis could never hold in every
case. At the same time, developmental process is extremely robust to local
variation. In the same way that genetically identical twins have different
fingerprints and organ microstructure, yet look the same from across the
room, biological development hits its global target even with local chaos
and contingency. In fact, self-organizing systems rely on stochasticity
(random perturbations and catalytic catastrophe occurring within a predictable
constraint envelope) to find their global attractors, a phenomenon von
Foerster called "order from noise" (Heylighen 1999). Our present
day, primitive human desire to be galactic colonizers, our individualist
wish to be rebels and break free of transcension physics, may be as unlikely
to manifest in a world with postbiological life and morality as an infectious
bacterium’s “desire” to replicate indefinitely while inside a human body,
or an individual quanta of energy's “desire” to break free of Newtonian
mesoscopic physics. Such events, while plausible from the "perspective"
of the bacterium or the quantum state, become very rare in these environmental
contexts.

With sufficiently advanced
SETI, we might discover brief broadcasts or occasional episodes of minor
galactic engineering occurring in small portions of a very few galaxies.
But because of the acceleration of complexification and the vast distances
between civilizations, it seems impossible that even an earliest-to-emerge
civilization, however oligarchic, could prevent multi-local transcensions
in any galaxy. In theory, one can imagine a contrarian civilization releasing
interstellar probes, carefully designed not to increase their intelligence
(and so, never be able to transcend) as they replicate. But what could
such probes do besides extinguish primitive life? They certainly couldn't
prevent multilocal transcensions. There seems no game theoretic value
to such a strategy, in a universe dominated by accelerating transcension.
Finally, if constrained transcension is the overwhelming norm, we should
have much greater success searching for the norm, not the rare exception.
As Cirkovic (2008) and Shostak (2010) have recently argued, we need SETI
strategies that focus on places where advanced postbiological civilizations
are likely to live. In the transcension hypothesis, this injunction would
include using optical SETI to discover the galactic transcension zone,
and define its outward-growing edge. We should look for rapid and artificial
processes of formation of planet-mass black holes, for leakage signals
and early METI emanating from life-supporting planets, and for the regular
cessation of these signals as or soon after these civilizations enter
into their technological singularities.

Forgan,
Duncan H. and Nichol, Robert C. 2010. A failure of serendipity: the
Square Kilometre Array will struggle to eavesdrop on human-like extraterrestrial
intelligence. International Journal of Astrobiology 10(2):77-81.

Maccone, Claudio. 1992/1994. Space Missions
Outside the Solar System to Exploit the Gravitational Lens of the Sun.
In: Proceedingsof the International Conference on Space Missions
and Astrodynamics, C. Maccone (Ed.), Turin, Italy, June 18, 1992,
and Journal of the British InterplanetarySociety 47,
45-52.

—— 2010b[2011]. Black
Holes: Attractors for Intelligence?Presentation at the Second IAA Symposium
onSearching for Life Signatures,
6-8 Oct 2010, Kavli Royal Society International
Centre, Buckinghamshire,
United Kingdom.
Submitted for publication.